Eclipse Indigo Releases 62 Open Source Projects

June 22, 2011

In the Eclipse world, the trains run on time and get longer every year.

The Eclipse Indigo release train is now officially available, delivering 62 projects covering 46 million lines of code. According to Eclipse, there were 408 developers and 49 organizations that contributed code and collaborated for the Indigo release.

"We're continuing to refine the release process and it's already quite scalable," Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation, told InternetNews.com. "Even though we're getting more and more projects and code, we're finding that we're able to leverage our history in moving the release train forward each year."

Milinkovich noted that from a Java developer perspective the Indigo release offers a number of interesting new projects. One of them is the WindowBuilder GUI project, which just became part of Eclipse this year. Google donated the technology to Eclipse in December of 2010, after first acquiring the technology from developer tools vendor Instantiations in August of 2010.

Milinkovich added that Git support is also part of Indigo with the inclusion of the EGit 1.0 release. He noted that EGit delivers Git version control system support from within the Eclipse workbench.

Indigo also marks the debut of the Jubula project, which provides automated GUI testing for Java and HTML. Milinkovich noted that Jubula is new as part of Eclipse, though it is based on code from a commercial product that has been around for years, called GUIdancer.

"The GUIdancer developers decided 9 months ago that bringing GUIdancer to Eclipse as an open source project would be good for their business," Milinkovich said. "It's definitely something that is a helpful addition for developers that are building applications and something that I think a lot of developers will find interesting."

On the modeling front, Milinkovich said that is an area that Eclipse has been active in for years and is delivering new innovations in for the Indigo release train. One such release is the Xtest 2.0 release which provides new features for domain specific languages.

"Xtext makes it so easy for people that are interested in creating domain-specific language to have an Eclipse-based toolchain for the new language," Milinkovich said. "That combination of being able to create a language and an Eclipse toolchain is very powerful and is helping to drive adoption."

CDO Model Repository 4.0 is another key component of Indigo. Milinkovich noted that as modeling gets more interesting the ability to store and manage very large models is becoming increasing important.

"CDO is our solution for that and now it has the ability to integrate with NoSQL backends, providing even more scalability," Milinkovich said.

On the EclipseRT side, the key Indigo project is the Equinox 3.7 release which is the reference implementation for the OSGi 4.3 specification. EclipseRT became a top level project at Eclipse in 2008 with the Equinox effort at the core.

"I think that the relationship we have with OSGi and the hosting of the reference implementation at Eclipse has been a big part of the success of Eclipse and of OSGi itself," Milinkovich said.